Photographs and textual materials generated by artist and writer John Clifford Cowles, documenting his time in Montana and his career in southern California.

John Clifford Cowles was born in 1861 in Freeport, Illinois and studied in New York City with Albert Bierstadt and others. He made a career as a painter and photographer in the American west during the 1880s and 1890s, before going to Paris to study with Albert Besnard and Jean-Charles Cazin. In his writing, some of which is collected here, Cowles asserts that Senator William Andrews Clark was his patron in the 1890s and that he aided in the growth of Clark's art collection, but the extent to which this may be true is unclear. Cowles returned to the US in the late 1890s and lived primarily in Los Angeles until his death in 1951. In 1932, he wrote The whispering buddha, a mystical mystery novel.

1.2 Linear Feet (2 boxes)

The Clark Library owns the property rights to its collections but does not hold the copyright to these materials and therefore cannot grant or deny permission to use them. Researchers are responsible for determining the copyright status of any materials they may wish to use, investigating the owner of the copyright, and obtaining permission for their intended publication or other use. In all cases, you must cite the Clark Library as the source with the following credit line: The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Collection is open for research.